Colleges step up development role

Town and gown relations in Worcester have had a checkered history at best.

City Hall and the local colleges have had their share of strained moments over the years, often at odds on a variety of issues.

It has also rubbed a lot of people the wrong way that colleges don’t pay taxes on most of their properties because of their tax-exempt, educational status.

Those folks all but consider the colleges to be freeloaders because they receive numerous services from the city. They feel the colleges receive far more from the community than what they give back to the community.

It also didn’t help matters any that some colleges seem to prefer to be islands unto themselves and have as little to do with Worcester as possible.

But that seems to be changing.

Today, the colleges, working in conjunction with city officials, are playing a much more active role in shaping Worcester’s future. They are no longer adversaries, but partners.

“Everyone seems to finally be on the same page and working together as a team to try and make Worcester a successful city,” said Mayor Joseph M. Petty. The college presidents “have great confidence in Worcester and they are very engaged in the community. They get it; they are eager to work with the city to get the job done. It’s something that you didn’t see much of before.”

Some of the colleges, in fact, are becoming big-time players when it comes to downtown development, willing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to change the downtown landscape and help breathe life back into it.

What is happening in the Lincoln Square area is a good example.

For the past several years, that part of the downtown has been littered with vacant buildings — the old courthouse, the Worcester Memorial Auditorium, the former Lincoln Square Boys Club, the old Worcester Vocational High School complex and the 3.5-acre former longtime home of the Morgan Construction Co. at Belmont and Lincoln streets.

While a private developer is moving forward on a $30 million project to redevelop the former century-old vocational school building into an 84-unit, mixed-income housing development, not much of anything else was happening with the other properties.

That was until Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which has been a major player in the development of Gateway Park, a stone’s throw from Lincoln Square, entered the picture last month.

WPI has an agreement with the city that gives it preferred developer status for the acquisition and renovation of the former Lincoln Square Boys Club.

WPI is looking at the vacant, city-owned building as a potential site for its business school and for a new business incubator for start-up companies. Under the agreement, WPI has until May 31 to conduct extensive due diligence before deciding whether it wants to buy the property.

If WPI does in fact go ahead with its plans and purchases the property, it would be a major coup for the redevelopment of the Lincoln Square area.

Those efforts got an even bigger boost last week when MCPHS University, formerly known as Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, announced it acquired the former Morgan Construction property for $2.9 million and intends to redevelop the property into rental apartments for its graduate students, staff and faculty.

All of which has the potential for making an impressive gateway into the downtown from Lincoln Square.

MCPHS would have a significant presence on both sides of Lincoln Square — housing at the former Morgan Construction property and classrooms and housing at the former Crowne Plaza hotel, which MCPHS purchased in June 2010 after it had closed — while WPI would be in the old Boys Club building.

“We believe this development will complement the exciting and dynamic revitalization of Lincoln Square and the north end of Main Street,” MCPHS President Charles F. Monahan Jr. said in an interview last week. “The fact that we are adjacent to WPI’s Gateway Park should make for a perfect gateway into the downtown.”

There are those who feel it will only be a matter of time before those projects spur greater development interest in the two tougher nuts to crack in the Lincoln Square area, the old courthouse and the Worcester Memorial Auditorium.

Councilor-at-Large Frederick C. Rushton, who chairs the City Council Economic Development Committee, said he firmly believes what the colleges are planning for the Lincoln Square area will create an “economic centrifuge” for the north end of Main Street.

He said that part of the downtown is beginning to mirror the Longwood Medical area in Boston and he believes the city should capitalize on that by encouraging future development opportunities for businesses that will be able to provide services to students, faculty and staff who will be living in that area.

Meanwhile, District 2 Councilor Philip P. Palmieri, who has been one of the more vocal advocates of a program to encourage colleges to make payments to the city in lieu of taxes, said what WPI and MCPHS are doing downtown will end up reaping significant tax benefits for the city in the long run.

He said their development efforts will provide strong anchors downtown that should end up attracting more private investment and expansion of the tax base.

“This will spread the downtown footprint past Lincoln Square,” Mr. Palmieri said. “We have colleges that have stepped up to the plate and are willing to invest in properties that have long been underused or have had various problems. They certainly deserve a lot of credit for being willing to make a significant investment in our city and being willing to work with us to make Worcester a better city.”

City Manager Michael V. O’Brien said the fact that a school like MCPHS has invested more than $350 million in Worcester since opening its downtown campus in 2000 is a sign of how town and gown relations have changed during the past decade.

“In the ultracompetitive world of economic development, imagine the types of federal, state and local incentives the city would need to layer to a potential developer to lure $350 million worth of investment,” Mr. O’Brien said. “MCPHS University has only asked for our moral support in return.

“As I have stated previously, the clarion call through the decades was for the city to have our colleges and universities expand their campuses into our downtown.”

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